Silk

Domesticated mammals get most of the ink of history, but silk and other insect-based products, like shellac, which is made from the excretion of Indian bugs, and cochineal, which is made from crushed bugs sourced in Mexico, have long human histories as well.

Aarathi Prasad’s book is on the history of silk. Sericulture, the farming of silk, is perhaps 7000 years old. The white mulberry-eating silkworm, caterpillar of the Bombyx mori moth, originated in China. There are now a thousand strains of this completely domesticated species found around the world. Today, B. mori can’t exist on its own in the wild. Even honeybees, the usual model of a captive species, can hang on in the wild, barely.

This I did not know: other moth species, particularly from India, but also from Africa, have also been cultivated for the silk they wrap their pupae in. These so-called wild silks also have a fascinating history.

Prasad also discusses a couple of other kinds of silk: that made by spiders, which has proved difficult to exploit; and the silky hairs or byssus of Pinna nobilis, a large Mediterranean shellfish that is now critically endangered.

The industrial chemical revolution made many natural products passé, of course, but at some cost to human and environmental health. The green/environmental movement has in some cases moved away from “better cancers through chemistry,” to twist the chemical industry’s old tag line, to revivals of older ways. Silk, after all, was never actually replicated by nylon or other petroleum products. And silks are now being used in all sorts of ways.

I do have a caveat about this book. It desperately needed copy-editing! Numbers in particular are mixed up. One glaring example: the same sentence mentions 300 species of birds, and then, two clauses away, over 800 species of birds, in the same particular place. Another was a confusion between millimeters and centimeters. (I know my blog posts are no model of finely-edited work, but then I’m not published by a reputable press.) The surprising lack of end-notes means there’s no way to tell what’s what, and no easy path to lead the curious reader to further explorations.